Cheap Tricks

    I fully expect my tombstone to say something like:
                                                                     Connie Lamb
                                                   She Never Paid Full Price for Anything
                                                              (including this tombstone.)

As a matter of fact, I would be disappointed if it doesn't say something like that, I don't care if my loved ones have to scratch over someone else's name. My main contribution to the family finances all these years has been saving money.  If my kids wanted to impress me with a recent purchase, they would say, "And Mom it was ON SALE".  I was recently at a couponing seminar where with a mere three to four hours a week, lots of driving around, letting manufacturers fill up your e-mail, clipping, sorting, carrying coupons and storing and rotating stock like a grocery store, you can feed your family on $50 per month.  When it was finished everyone around me was saying "That's too hard." or "I don't have that kind of time.", including me.  Coupons only save you money if you insist on buying name brands.
     My method takes 15 minutes per week:  1)check the sales ads 2) buy what's on sale 3) go home.  If you don't get the newspaper most ads are available on line, sometimes by home delivery or always at the front of the store.  Grocery sales cycle about every three months.  That means you don't have to buy and store large quantities, just enough to last until the next sales cycle. Except in cases of 12 hour or early bird sales, I buy groceries when my errands take me near that particular store, there is seldom need to make a special trip.       
     Furniture and home improvement items go on sale around holidays.  Unless you are shopping for growing children and don't know what size they will need, buy clothes at season end.  I don't even bother looking at a clearance rack until it is 75 percent off.  Clothes shopping goes very quickly for me because I check the clearance racks and leave.  For me the feeling of finding a good 90 percent off sale is like my hunter husband  feels after shooting an elk., I've bagged the big one.
     When you know the good sale prices, you can shop at warehouse stores like Costco and know which items are really a better deal. However, if you feed  many mouths, the convenience of having to shop less often may be worth more than saving money.  My method will not work for people who decide what to fix for dinner on their way home from work, chances of your random choice intersecting with a sale price are slim.  I've always kept some basics on hand even when all we had was a refrigerator freezer: a chicken, roast, pork chops or ribs, burger etc.  It is much easier to remember to thaw out the meat than to stop at the store on the way home from work.
     Saving money is easy but takes some planning. God has given us money as a way to meet our needs, paying more money than you have to is like flinging that blessing out the window. Also, being frugal in spending allows you to be generous in giving.  I would rather work a little at saving money than work harder and longer to earn it.  Remember, "You get what you pay for." is usually quoted by people who just paid too much or are trying to sell something. Even I have my limits though, I may only buy toilet tissue when it's on sale but I won't buy one ply regardless of the price.  Also it's not a good deal if you didn't need it in the first place or don't know how you'll pay for it.  By following these simple guidelines, you too can be as cheap and easy as I am.

You Change the Dream

     I tried not to have too many unrealistic dreams about the looks, intelligence or talents of my children there was, after all, only so much genetic material to work with, and I remembered myself and my siblings too well to have illusions about their behavior, but parents do have dreams for their children:  high school graduation, maybe college, marriage and children (in that order).  My two older children graduated from the Christian school, both attended college for a time, my daughter married a wonderful Christian man.  We have had Christian friends with a "cookie cutter" parenting plan where each child was expected to do the same thing, for instance, play piano and one other instrument, participate in sports, go to the same college etc., but my children were distinct individuals and the one-size-fits-all plan was not going to work for them.  It worked best to train up my child in the way he should go, tailoring my parenting to the child.  They didn't always think it was fair but, deep down, I think they knew it was right.
     So when my youngest son began struggling at the Christian school, I had to make a new plan.  I didn't want him to attend the public high school when he wasn't spiritually strong and he wanted to drop out so, much against my wishes, I began to home school him his sophomore year.  There are a lot of home schoolers in Kalispell, they have a choir, sports teams and other groups that meet together.  When Tracy finished high school he could have participated in the home school graduation ceremony but its formality didn't fit my son's personality and I knew I would have to let go of  the dream of watching him walk forward to receive his diploma.  There are few rites of passage in American life and this one was important to me, so I changed the dream.  I made his diploma on the computer, had an extended family ceremony for him, even had him pose in his brother's hand-me-down cap and gown.  It was not the same, but it was what was needed.
     I still wish for my sons the pure wedding night my daughter had with her husband, though I know those are nearly extinct, even among Christians, and for all I know, it may already be too late.  We live in a broken society and, though our standards must be high, we have to be flexible enough to adapt to what is when it is not what we wanted.  So far I have been spared many of the hard situations I have seen my friends face divorce, unwed pregnancies, chronic illness etc., but I hope to have the strength not just to let my dreams die, but to change the dream to something that fits the new reality I may be called to face.  It is important that we put our hope not just in Gods' ability to keep our children on the right path, but to redeem to mistakes they make while on the wrong path.  We cannot correct the damage or cancel our disappointment, but we can change the dream.

In Heat

     This is not going to be as raunchy as it sounds, okay, this next sentence may still be. My husband and I like to be in heat, but not with each other. Reed likes to hot tub. Most of our lives that meant he sat in the bathtub continually letting out the cooling water to refill it with hot. Thanks to our daughter we now have a hot tub. She worked for a spa company and refurbished a trade-in unit as a gift to us.  When we installed it on our front deck, I told my niece and nephew, who had confused us with rich people, that we were now officially rich. The only problem is I don't like to hot tub. I haven't bathed in years, I am a shower person, a long session in the hot tub for me would be 5 minutes. I love being warm and there is something appealingly decadent about sitting outside warm and content while looking at the stars in winter, but I don't have the patience to stay there.  You have to shower before you use the spa and again afterward. Reed loves to soak in it for half an hour in the mornings on weekends. I like to sleep in but, as soon as my feet hit the floor, I am showered, groomed and dressed in half an hour. The other reasonable time to hot tub is before bedtime but the shower and walk on the cold deck getting there and back spoil the attraction for me.
     One place I do sometimes use a hot tub is at a hotel. The reason I am willing to soak in the chlorine scented stranger bisque at a public facility but not at home with familiar germs, is that when I am staying at a hotel I have leisure time. I won't need to jump out to put in a load of laundry or any of the hundred housework tasks that fill my days. At hotels I can relax. And being in the hot tub is better than being in the pool, which is way too cold.
     My favorite place to be in heat is in our laundry room. Anyone who has spent much time around my house knows that I sit on my dryer. When I was a little girl our clothes dryer vented out the front near the floor. One of my favorite childhood memories is sitting on the floor in front of that dryer. I would warm my hands, still red from playing outside in the snow, until the tingling, pin prick sensation made me pull away. Besides making me warm, it was also a good place to sing, as with water in the shower, the sound of the dryer made my voice sound smoother. I felt sorry for my playmates whose dryers vented outside and we could only enjoy them when we were standing out in the snow.
     My husband and I didn't have our own dryer until our second year of marriage, those years happened to be record cold winters in the already-cold-enough town of Helena, Montana. We vented the dryer inside in the winter more for self preservation than comfort. We lived in apartments through the Denver phase of our marriage and, even in big cities, people would think it strange to see a tenant sitting on the dryer in the laundry room and, of course, they were always vented outside anyway. A few months after we moved to Billings, we were able to buy a house and, once again, the dryer was my private sauna.
     The laundry room in the house we have now has no room to lay the vent hose on the floor, so in the winter when it is vented inside, I sit on top of the dryer where the hose vents out and, just like when I was a girl I bask and dream and sometimes sing. I intend to continue as long as I'm able to climb up there. Now that I'm older and gravity is stronger, I keep a little stool handy to make up for what time has taken away. But time cannot take away what those times with the dryer gave to me, warm memories.
     The laundry room is semi-private but real estate atop the dryer is limited, so my time in my sauna is my own. Unlike using the spa, there is no stripping or showering required, and drying clothes is something that has to be done anyway, so the time isn't totally wasted. Reed and I will most likely continue to be contentedly incompatible about being in heat, but I believe being comfortably different is a key to a lasting marriage--and most friendships. Reed can continue to be in hot water, while I remain full of hot air.

In Rut

     It is deer hunting season, a time when the males are flooded with testosterone and begin pawing, snorting and spoiling for a fight; apparently something similar happens to buck deer.  Does find this behavior conducive to mating, it has the opposite effect on me.  I grew up in Montana but am not from a hunting family.  My husband, on the other hand, had grown up hunting.  When we were newly married, we lived in Helena where lots of hunting is available but Reed was not.  He was in school full time and working full time and we didn't have a vehicle capable of getting both into and out of the woods, so he did very little hunting there.  After two years we moved to Denver where hunting in a big city is frowned upon.  So hunting wasn't a significant part of our married lives until we moved to Kalispell.  That is where I learned about going into rut.
     As the fall progressed, my husband would begin to get restless.  Throughout the year Reed regarded airplanes being broken at work or repairs needed at home as a routine part of life, but during hunting season they were deliberate acts of sabotage bent on ruining his life.  He became convinced that the only reason I married him was to separate him from everything he enjoyed.  How did he figure it out when I had tried to carefully hide that during our previous seven years of marriage?
     Through the years of my husband and sons hunting I learned how to disguise and eventually tolerate the taste of venison, to pray for my hunters' success instead of just safety, and the importance of taking pictures of the proud hunters and their upside down, tongue lolling trophies. There is no disconnect in the male psyche between admiring the beauty of an animal one moment and blowing its brains out the next.  Despite the baldness that indicates the abundance of testosterone still coursing through my husband, rut isn't as bad as it used to be.  He may still believe I am trying to eliminate all happiness from his life, but accepts that I am apparently in no hurry.  Frankly, I would rather live with a man who goes in rut occasionally than one who lives in a rut perpetually.

No Hypothetical Grace

     Another topic for the devotional I haven't been asked to give is: There is no such thing as hypothetical grace.  As a girl I would sometimes let myself imagine how I would deal with a death in my family or divorce, like so many of my friends had faced.  I was not a Christian then; I didn't know how the grace of God carries you through unbearable circumstances, but even as a Christian when my friends faced those impossible times,  I was convinced I wouldn't be able to.  That is because there is no such thing as hypothetical grace.  God doesn't give us His grace to face the possibility of loss, He gives it for the reality. 
     As a descendant of very long lived women, I will almost certainly face being widowed.  This is true for most women.  It is prudent to prepare for that by understanding your finances and life insurance, knowing the location of important papers, and how to take care of, or who to call, for car and house repairs.  As an older friend said while struggling to roll up her sleeping bag after a women's retreat, "If I'd known he was going to die, I'd have asked a lot more questions."  We can, and should, prepare beforehand in these ways, but we cannot prepare our emotions, we cannot cope ahead of time.  I often told my children, "The head doesn't tell the heart what to do."  This was mostly a warning against dating non-Christians, but it is also true for those hardships we anticipate.  We can prepare our mind, we cannot prepare our heart.
     When my children were young, I would see families in our church heartbroken over children who walked away from God.  I told God I couldn't bear such a thing and prayed that my children would be faithful all their lives. But when he turned 14,  my youngest, my loving son with a gentle soul, began to doubt and wander from God.  He didn't turn hard, but certainly ungrateful, like many teens, and he hid behaviors he knew we wouldn't approve of.  Although we allowed him to attend a different church with his best friend, we insisted he go to church until he turned 18. We could have made church attendance a condition of living in our home,  as some Christians do, but we felt that if a grown child is going to church only because he is coerced, it is probably of no benefit to him.  One of the things parents have to let go of when their children graduate, is the right to tell them what to do.  Our son is now 23, he still doesn't attend church or read his Bible.  He believes in God, but not that God is personally involved in his life.
      I am coping through these long years of waiting by the grace of God.  I have learned to look past the tattoos, piercings and cigarettes to the still gentle young man inside.  He is one of my favorite people to spend time with.  I remember that the God who began a good work in my son's heart when he was four years old, will be faithful to complete it.  I remember that where we end up depends more on God's faithfulness than ours.  If how we finish as Christians depended on us, none of us would remain obedient.  And I remember that I, too, struggle with seeing God as passive.
     Some of the best advice I read about Christian parenting was in a book by Edith Schaeffer, she wrote that the stage we are at as Christians is because of the experiences God has brought into our lives. He also has to do that in our children's lives, let them get there.  Naturally we want to spare our children from making our mistakes, but it isn't realistic to expect our warnings to impact them as much as real life experience.  Few of us fell into sins because we were never warned, all of us have a conscience, we simply chose to ignore the warning.
     There are Christian books promising godly children, good health and financial security, often these are worth reading because they contain good principles, but God has offered us no such guarantees for this life and the pursuit of them is a sinful pursuit.  Those promises are for heaven.  Sometimes these false hopes are based on biblical proverbs, which are statements of general truth, but not promises of God.  Hebrews 11:32-40 shows that many of God's greatest servants suffered incredible hardships, we will suffer as well, partly because it is the human condition and partly because of God's inscrutable plan for our lives. What God has promised is His presence in our suffering and His grace to endure, just when we need it, one day at a time.

 

Perfect Weakness

     If I were God and condescended enough to use a flawed human being like myself to work out my divine purpose, I would use people at their spiritual peak, limited as that may be. Apparently God and I don't think alike because He keeps trying to use me when I am spiritually floundering.  There have been many times in my life when I am confidently trusting and obeying God.  But there are also times when I return to my besetting sin and find myself in a spiritual vortex.  I begin and end my days feeling like a failure.  In those times God has brought into my life people spiritually needier than myself.  I talk to them about what the Bible says, but not as one who has arrived spiritually.
     It's almost as if God thinks I have a problem with arrogance. My 38 years as a Christian have revealed to me that I am a pride onion, as soon as one layer is removed, more pride is underneath. That is one of the reasons I don't listen to"talk" radio programs, I am arrogant enough without an outsider telling me that not only am I right, but it's okay to ridicule people who don't agree with me.  Rudeness sells, but God doesn't buy it. Christians are called to be humble even when we we're right; I have a hard enough time doing that when I'm wrong which, in my own opinion, seldom occurs.  Realizing when you're wrong takes all the fun out of arrogance.  However, I am so skilled at projecting poise that when I was broken enough to wind up in a psych ward, the staff thought I was there for a job interview. I call it "terminal competence", the ability to look so together outside when inside I am quivering jello. I have been able to forgive and show mercy to others, not because I a such a saint, but because I am such a sinner. People know I understand their struggles, because I share them. 
     I have often wished I could have the apostle Paul over for dinner because he understood this so well. Jello hadn't been invented yet, but he understood weakness perfectly and the verses he wrote about it are very comforting to me. He said that "God's strength is made perfect in weakness" and "when I am weak, then I am strong." I know that God can use his word to change the lives of the people I speak to, even though it comes from such a flawed mouthpiece. God uses me most when I am perfect--perfectly weak.